Death, Deception, and the $4 Million Cobra

Thirty-seven years after Carroll Shelby's extraordinary little race car made big news everywhere . . . it does it again.

Near the end of the 1960s, a newly hired mansion manager named George Brand wound up with it. Brand was an ex-cop who was pushing 50 and had gone to work for Spector about 1968, the same year Brand was divorced from his wife, Dorothy. Russell remembers him as "a helluva nice guy-could do anything, some kind of house man for Spector, very practical." Precisely how Brand wound up with the car would become, 32 years later, the multimillion-dollar question. Brand is 80 now, lives in an assisted-living home, and has a mental disorder similar to early-stage Alzheimer's, but has been quoted as saying Spector sold it to him for $1000. Brand would work for the difficult Mr. Spector for 19 years. When his health failed, sources say, he retired, sought health benefits, and not getting them, successfully sued Spector.

Back in '68, Brand looked around for a place to store the Cobra. His daughter, Donna, volunteered a garage-type storage unit she rented. Donna was in her early 20s and had been married about three years to her high-school sweetheart, John O'Hara, who worked at an orange grove in Yorba Linda. The O'Haras wanted to drive it around, so they managed to get the race car registered, reportedly without her father's knowledge, in both their names. But race cars are mechanical headaches on the street, and near the end of '71, it went into storage.

The Cobra was still garaged when the O'Haras' marriage ended, childless, in 1982. John O'Hara reportedly made no claim to the Cobra when the couple divided up their assets. The car sat in storage, and Donna paid the monthly fees.

About 1988, she got the job at a Sears distribution center. Soon she was dating a forklift driver there, Robert Doty, although Donna would break it off six months later. But she did invite Doty, who eventually became her supervisor at work, to invest in buying a home in 1990 in La Habra and becoming housemates. Doty hoped it might rekindle a romance, but it was not to be: "The first time I walked into the house, she said, 'There are four rooms. Which one do you want?'" Doty moved out in 1993 and is now married.

Asked to describe Donna, Doty, now 52, said, "She was a very strong individual. She didn't need nobody. She was an independent person-the most independent person I've ever known. She was very beautiful. She went to museums. She was very intelligent. She had a way of doing things, but anybody who says she was disturbed just didn't know the lady."

A cousin, Chuck Jones, described her as "a very sensitive person, very cultured," who was involved in the arts and theater of Orange County.

In those years, Doty says she never mentioned the Cobra to him, nor spoke of her marriage of 17 years. "She was a very, very private person," he says. And then, about five years ago, a vintage-car collector tracked her down and offered $150,000 for the Cobra. Doty recalls, "I thought he was talking about a Shelby Mustang. Whatever, she said no, and she said she did not want to talk about it. I told her she could pay off the house with the money, but she said no."

Word of the "lost Cobra" spread. Car hunters began circling, only to be rebuked, rudely. There was an offer of $500,000. Donna O'Hara seemed to get angrier as the hunters closed in. She got a reputation as being weird. When Carroll Shelby came calling, she would not concede even that she had the car. She was "kooky," he said. A lawyer's investigator who came bearing an offer of $2 million was supposedly run off her front yard.

Everyone agrees Donna O'Hara's life began to fall apart by the summer of 2000. In August, she suddenly broke off with a boyfriend. Doty was a constant reminder that they'd agreed to cash out the house when Donna turned 55 in February. She would have to move out.

Then there was the job. A relative says she was about to be fired. Sears refuses to comment. After her death, a file was found among her papers in which Donna alleged all sorts of improprieties at the office; in the file was a news clipping about a person who had won millions in a whistle-blower case. A co-worker says she was simply paranoid, thought people were out to get her, and went around in a simmering rage.